See Inside The M3 Grant | Tank Chats Reloaded

hello in this edition of tank chats reloaded I'd like to talk about on a more unusual designs of World War II the M3 Grant in tank chats reloaded you'll be revisiting old favorites from the tank chat series and taking a new look at these Fighting Machines this video has been made possible by our supports on patreon our YouTube members and our super thanks donors please join them if you can't and support tank Museum and thanks for watching the grant is an American design known to them as the M3 medium but it's probably best known for its service with the British Army and particularly in the western desert before we go any further I think I should explain this is a tank with a variety of names its original configuration the US Army's M3 medium tank was known to the British as the General Lee and that had a smaller turret with a large machine gun cupola on top the version modified for British service had a larger turret and no cupola and that was called The General Grant that's what we've got here although by the exigencies of wartime Supply the British army ended up using both Lee's and grants our tank is one of 501 that produced by the Pressed steel carco of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in fact it's very likely that our tank is t24689 which would make it one of the first three sent to the UK for evaluation in September 1941. it's a funny looking Beast the main almond here the 75 millimeter gun is in a sponson in the hull and then the secondary almond is 37 is in a turret stuck on top which makes the whole town really very tall why is this well the design came up two things one was the US Army's realization that seeing the performance of German armor in 1940 they urgently needed a tank able to mount the M2 75 millimeter gun the other was the British Army's need for over 3 000 medium tanks to replace the losses in France the problem was that up to this point our American industry has no experience of mass tank production um I mean only about 300 American tanks had ever been built in total so production facilities have to be constructed and the expertise brought in of the car industry we're talking particularly about the Chrysler Corporation here in mid 1941 U.S designers and Engineers didn't have the experience necessary to produce a turret able to mount the 75 millimeter so as a stop Gap measure to make the tank quick and easy to produce they put it in the hull now the good news is that the 75 mil for the time was a very good tank gun British tank crews in North Africa it ended up with a whole lot of these vehicles we're delighted to have a gun that was powerful enough to knock out Panzer threes and fours quite easily and at a long range and this is a big Leap Forward would fart both he and AP both the 37 and the 75 millimeter guns are gyroscopically stabilized in the vertical which does mean that firing from the move is a possibility certainly a lower speeds the bad news though is that 75 it's in this sponsor in the hull you've only got 30 degrees of Traverse and firing from a hold down position is just about impossible the sheer height of the tank meant the tank commander had to take great care not to present an easy target for enemy tank and anti-tank guns as you can see the tanks of riveted Construction the degree of armor protection 50 millimeters around the front and sides of the hull is quite good for the early War period but riveting as opposed to welding is a drawback if the tank was hit by a non-penetrating round rivets could Shear off very destructively and at very high speed the suspension is of the vertical Volute spring type and there are three units each side and they incorporate each one incorporates two road wheels and a return roller that's actually quite good news because if one of those units is damaged it can be replaced relatively easily the gearbox was at the front as you can see from the positioning of the sprocket Wheels the engine is a 360 horsepower right Continental r975 based on an aero engine design and that gave the tank a top speed of 26 miles an hour on Road and around 16 miles per hour off-road its weight was 27.9 tons the tanks cross-country ability wasn't particularly good I'm afraid and that's probably got something to do with its height to begin with and also the fact this track really isn't very aggressive doesn't give you particularly good grip the bottom half of this tank is starting to remind you of an M4 Sherman there's a very good reason for that when they'd sorted turret design out a lot of the M3 the Mechanicals especially would go on to be used in the Sherman we'll talk a bit more about the external features later but for now I'd like to get inside the tank there are two side access doors something quite common at the time but really necessary here given the height of the tank and the number of the crew from the outside the grant looks as though it ought to be quite spacious but once you're inside the tank you realize that really isn't the case to begin with a lot of the room is taken up by this turret basket and then you've got to factor in a crew of six a Gunner and loader the 75 the same for the 37 a driver and a commander so you know there's three guys in this small space alone this really is a very cramped vehicle front center is the driver's position he's effectively on top of the gearbox so gear changing was fairly light the tank steered as most tanks do through differential braking via the steering levers break the left track and the right track pushes you round to the left and so forth one thing that would have been a pleasant surprise is the Tank's reliability you could turn it off at the end of the day and when you press the start button first thing in the morning the chances are roaring to life and that's quite a contrast with most British tanks of the period it's also something you would share with its successor the M4 Sherman the driver also has two whole mounted 30 caliber Browning machine guns um these are a bit of a fixation with American Tank designers in the period um the early Shermans have them as well but I can't imagine there'd be much use and the idea gets abandoned looking at the sponson Mount of the 75 millimeter gun the thing that strikes you is how limited its scope for movement is Traverse is just 15 degrees left 15 degrees right and elevation minus nine to plus 20. so that's actually very very limited Traverse indeed successfully acquiring a Target would mean some skillful positioning of the tank by the commander and of course as we said previously there's no chance of hold down positioning so the Tank's going to be exposed the gun was aimed via Periscope in the top of the sponson which included a telescopic site the first armor-piercing round issued was basic AP effectively solid shot but then that was replaced with an apcbc round if you want an explanation of that please watch our Evolution ammo video now that round has a muzzle velocity of 588 meters a second and it can penetrate up to 60 mil of 30 degree slope armor at a thousand meters now that is pretty good for the period but for British tank Crews the massive Improvement was the fact that there was an he round being able to fire 14 pounds of high explosive at a Troublesome anti-tank gun was a massive Improvement on the two pounder guns they'd had before which hadn't got an he capability at all moving back into the fighting compartment I'm actually sitting in the commander seat in the turret cage you can see uh this is the turret you've got the breach for the 37 millimeter gun the turret controls and then you start to pick up some of the ammunition storage we've got 65 rounds for the 75 millimeter gun and 128 for the 37 mil being a grant rather than the M3 medium the original American vehicle the British called the Lee it's got a different turret so it's got a bulge here on the back to contain the comms kit and originally the Americans had a separate coupler on top with a 30 caliber machine gun British think that's unnecessary say we just replace it with a simple hatch originally uh the US tank there'd be a radio man in here as well a seventh crew member but that really just makes it too crowded and after a while that is binned and the job is given to the driver the secondary almond up in the turret there is the m6 37 millimeter gun that's something of a fellow traveler with the British two Panda they both start off as wheeled anti-tank guns then they're mounted on tanks that gun is pretty well obsolete by the middle stages of the war but in the western desert it's actually quite potent against things like the Panzer 2 Panzer 3 and most of the Italian armor in addition the turret has a coaxially mounted 0.30 caliber Browning machine gun and a power Traverse capable of turning through 360 degrees in 19 seconds operated by the Gunner with a spade grip so what was it like to fight this tank with its complicated layout and its huge crew I think that's best described by a British tank commander Lieutenant Ken Giles the 75 is firing the 37 is firing but is traversed around the wrong way the brownings jammed I'm saying driver Advance on the a set and the driver who can't hear me is reversing and as I look over the top of the tank as the 12 enemy tanks 50 yards away someone hands me a cheese sandwich Western desert is a theater of war quite unlike any other biting extremes of coal and heat the dust storms are hamzin that could blow for days on end and featureless terrain and this is quite a mobile war that will leave units stranded Behind Enemy Lines now the problem for the grant is that there's very little natural cover and this is a very tall vehicle so this puts it at a big disadvantage both the British Army and the US Army who used small numbers of M3 mediums in Tunisia found this vehicle less than ideal for the Desert War the Americans withdrew them as soon as sufficient numbers of M4 Shermans were available but they did hang on to a few as command tanks and armored recovery vehicles having been withdrawn Lee grants and M3s were redeployed by the US Army to the Pacific Theater where small numbers were used in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign and by the British army to India and Burma 517 leaves and 379 grants were supplied to the British Indian army for use against the Japanese the 75 millimeter gun was quite effective in jungle warfare they're able to use smoke runs as Target indicators against enemy positions and a mixture of he and AP to dispose of enemy bunkers the 37 millimeter are the canister that that fard was apparently quite effective against Japanese Infantry the Grant had not been designed with jungle warfare in mind but having said that it was surprisingly good at the job in one of the hardest short and bloodiest Encounters of the campaign the battle of the tennis court kahima in May 1944 Japanese troops had dug in on the kohima ridge around the ruins the district Commissioners Bungalow and his tennis court and they'd repelled several waves of attackers with severe casualties the problem was finally resolved when Royal Engineers managed to winch a grant tank of 149 regiment Royal armored Corps commanded by Sergeant Waterhouse up through the jungle and dropped it down a 10-foot slope onto the tennis court with an enormous crash the tank uses 75 millimeter gun to knock out a series of enemy bunkers at a range of less than 20 meters and this enabled men of the second dorsets to take the position at the point of the bayonet after 16 days of bloody fighting speaking about the action Brigadier George wood and this is a guy who wasn't one for arbitrary praise said they could not have done better a few years ago I was fortunate enough to meet the family descendants of Sergeant Waterhouse and we agreed that although they didn't get a reward for the action he should have had a DCM at least 777 grants were supplied to the Australian Army where they were used for training and Home Defense a total of 1 386 grants are also supplied to the Soviet Union they didn't seem to appreciate the vehicle they called it a grave for Seven Brothers the chassis and running gear was also used in the Canadian Ram tank and the M7 priest self-propelled gun when all is said and done the grant was a stop Gap albeit one did render useful service in the western desert in the Pacific and in Burma I think its most important service though was to bridge a gap for the U.S tank making industry following on from the pre-war medium M2 where the medium M3 in its Lee and Grant configurations began the M4 Sherman would follow the groundwork was laid for the industry that contributes so much to Allied victory in World War II I hope you've enjoyed this video and thank you for watching if you have Please Subscribe and if you can please support us on patreon

Channel: The Tank Museum

Views: 175,797

Keywords: Bovington, Dorset, Tanks, Tankfest, tanks, tiger, chieftain, tank museum, second world war, world war two, top five tanks, tank chats, david fletcher, british army, tiger 131, royal armoured corps, tank regiment, RAC, tank museum bovington, tanklife, bovingtontank museum, military history, ww2, ww1, armoured car, tankchats, army, veteran, wwii history, world war 1, world war ii, war history, royal navy, ww2 history, royal air force, wwii museum, wwi, ww2 tanks, ww2 weapons

Id: BEsamU1qv68

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2023